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When she was first posted to Crescent Town Public School, tucked among highrises of families from Bangladesh, principal Tammy Ross thought she should get a traditional “salwar kameez” — tunic and pants — to wear from time to time.

It would help this daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors show respect for her students’ background and help her connect with her new east-end community near Victoria Park and Danforth Ave.

When word of her plan spread along the mothers’ grapevine, they presented Ross with a salwar kameez as a gift.

As more and more of these often-isolated families got to know the principal with the open door — so different from the stand-offish headmasters back home, happy to help with personal matters from parenting to finding a job — Ross found herself the recipient of another salwar kameez.

And another.

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Now, 15 years later as she retires, Ross has a wardrobe of the graceful outfits, all gifts from the community that has embraced her, and the school.

They kept arriving when Ross’ elderly parents started cooking 1,000 potato latkes every Hanukkah for the kids, most of whom are Muslim. When Ross’ father passed away, her mother kept coming each week to make Hallal-friendly English-muffin pizzas for the kindergartens.

Halal Italian pizza, Jewish latkes, a Polish-Canadian principal who wears Bengali clothes — under this award-winning leader’s watch, Crescent Town has become a poster child for the sort of cross-cultural mash-ups for which Toronto schools — and Canada’s education system — are becoming known around the world. Educators from Germany and China have come to see how the school connects with its vertical village.

“Everyone knows Ms Ross; her door is always open and even the small children at the parenting centre get very attached before they start kindergarten,” said mother Tahmina Haque, a former teacher in Bangladesh whom Ross helped with a Canadian resume for a job as a lunchroom supervisor.

“The school gives us so much,” said Haque. “The school and the community are quite attached.”

Crescent Town is like many schools in the most diverse city in the country, with students from 30 countries, several staff hired from the community, a corner of its library filled with dual-language books — English paired with everything from Urdu to Tamil, Farsi to Vietnamese, so parents who don’t read English can still read with their children. It has a parenting centre and settlement worker on site. As part of the Toronto District School Board’s “Model Schools for Inner Cities” program, Crescent Town gets extra funding for free eye and ear care, doctors’ visits at the school, discounts on field trips and extra teacher training.

Morale — and test scores — are strong in a community where 60 per cent of families earn less than $30,000 a year. Many two-bedroom apartments here house more than one family, and Ross has visited families where mattresses are stacked neatly during the day and drapery tracks along the ceiling hold curtains that can be drawn throughout the rooms for privacy.

But language, not poverty, is the biggest barrier these children face, said Ross.

“These parents very much value education and many are highly educated but just can’t get jobs here in their field. But they respect education and respect teachers — if we say you should read with your child, they’ll read with their child.”

There are challenges, to be sure; some families pull their children out of school to visit Bangladesh or Pakistan for weeks and months at a time, leaving gaps in their learning that are tough to fill.

“Others come to school tired because they’ve stayed up late waiting for Daddy to come home from work. Many, many fathers here work as cab drivers,” said Ross.

Still, Ross’s personal outreach has built such bridges with the community, she was named one of the Learning Partnership’s outstanding principals of 2013 and the TDSB dared not move her, especially through two major construction projects over the past decade.

“She’s what you call ‘all-in’ — and things that may seem goofy like wearing the traditional clothes actually show a real sensitivity to the community,” said Trustee Sheila Cary-Meagher. “She’s forever trying to find jobs for people; I call it her employment agency.”

Yasmin Hasan came to Canada in 1995 from Bangladesh with her husband, three sons and a Master’s Degree in International Relations that she couldn’t use. She began as a parent volunteer at the school and with Ross’ encouragement, went back to university to become a teacher and now teaches English as a second language at Crescent Town.

“Tammy has set the tone of the school — so welcoming,” she said, “and it’s a very good lesson for the kids to see how to respect other people’s traditions.”

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